RATING
Director(s): Alonso Ruizpalacios
Country: Mexico, United States
Author: Alonso Ruizpalacios, Arnold Wesker
Actor(s): Raul Briones, Rooney Mara, James Waterston
Written by Tom Augustine.
A while back I lived not far from Times Square, and it was the general feeling among New Yorkers that it was a space to be avoided at all costs. I would walk through it to get home from my job working as a server at a cinema-restaurant hybrid, passing through its hyperbright passageways late at night, when on a Monday or a Tuesday the assertion that it’s the city that never sleeps would be challenged. The idea that anyone would willingly go to a restaurant in Times Square is utterly freakish to me — it is a carnival to be witnessed briefly and then forever abandoned for the better parts of the greatest city in the world. It is certainly no place for a meal. That said, such restaurants exist, as in Mexican filmmaker Alonso Ruizpalacios’ accomplished feature La Cocina, which delves into the lives, struggles and interpersonal dramas of the (largely undocumented) staff of a Times Square kitchen named The Grill, and front of house. Ruizpalacios clearly understands what the diners at said restaurants have not clocked — that such a place is hell, where dreams go to die. Though the film has been regularly compared to the underwhelming television series The Bear, it is a far better and more politically clearsighted work than that buzzy item. The restaurant in La Cocina, staffed by desperate people just scraping by in a country ruled over by a despotic asshole, and owned by a petty, cruel man who enjoys the power he wields over vulnerable people, serves crap. None of the burgers or chicken marsala that is served looks even the slightest bit appetising. It’s something that helps La Cocina stand out from other kitchen-set films — unlike The Bear, or The Menu, or Menus-Plaisirs: Les Troisgros, or even Ratatouille, there is little fetishisation of the food on offer, which is often used to justify the draconian suffering of the cooks in the kitchen (the trauma scars left on them erased by the presence of a really good fucking meal). The film is, in this regard, closer to something like the monumentally disturbing Compliance, which uses its food as a weapon of unease. Ruizpalacios is too interested in the landscapes of the human face, and the emotions running beneath, to get too caught up in food porn.
A sprawling, multicultural, Altmanesque cast populates La Cocina, with the central focus being on star-cross’d lovers Pedro (Raúl Briones Carmona, exceptional) and Julia (Rooney Mara, slightly out of place). Pedro is undocumented, a live-wire ticking time bomb of a man, deeply self destructive and impulsive. He’s gotten Julia pregnant, and Julia is struggling to decide what to do about it. An abortion costs around eight-hundred dollars, which just happens to be the amount stolen from the restaurant payroll the night before. Meanwhile, a new, non-English-speaking kitchen worker named Estela (Anna Diaz) arrives to start her first day in the chaotic swirl of the sprawling workspace. There are stressed waitresses struggling to raise their voices above the din; spiritually exhausted line cooks; racist chefs, and a broken soda machine to contend with. The overwhelming tension and stress of the space is present, certainly, but a dreamlike countenance lingers on the face of La Cocina, adding to the film’s languorous pace and beefy runtime (nearly two and a half hours, arguably a little too long for a film of this nature). Lensed in gorgeous, atmospheric black and white, the films I was most reminded of by Ruizpalacios’ feature were Kassovitz’ masterpiece La Haine, in its treatment of the precarious, frequently threatened lives of an urban underclass, and most especially Ruizpalacios’ Mexican counterpart Alfonso Cuáron’s Roma, which shares La Cocina’s passion for working class stories rendered in muscular, handsomely ambitious cinematic storytelling. Like that film, La Cocina is an imperfect offering, sharing many of the same flaws, but a memorable swing nonetheless.
Premiering this month on Rialto Channel, Mexican filmmaker Alonso Ruizpalacios vividly captures the bustling, precarious life of the staff of a Times Square restaurant, largely comprised of undocumented immigrants. Humanistic, ambitious, perhaps a little overcooked, and eventually enraging, it’s a vital document of the trials of America’s most vulnerable class.
Ruizpalacios brings a showman’s excessiveness to his direction of La Cocina, offsetting a fairly thin, predictable narrative whose arc and climax feels largely like a foregone conclusion from the outset. Often, this leads to some impressive sequences and allows the film to shake off any sense of staginess in spite of its confined setting — rarely does the film leave the hotbed of The Grill. Like Cuáron and several other beloved Mexican auteurs (Iñarritu, Del Toro) before him, Ruizpalacios occasionally mistakes a lot of direction for good direction, as in a burdensome, overcooked one-take sequence at the beginning of dinner service, complete with a hackneyed metaphor in the form of an overflowing soda machine that soon leads to soda sloshing around the ankles of the kitchen workers. Overwritten, indulgent monologues are also present, again padding the runtime unnecessarily — did we really need a theatrically long explanation of Julia’s past failed marriage to understand the desperation of her situation here? At times, on-the-nose sequences like these threaten to spoil La Cocina’s delicate recipe — Ruizpalacios’ need to impress, and impress upon the audience the importance of the story, proves distancing, allowing us to appreciate but not fully engage. The film is far better as a Do The Right Thing-esque microcosm of the modern American melting pot, with its many misunderstandings and grievances, the dim, looming menace of the hypercapitalist money machine always just offscreen. Most interesting is its learned treatment of the long-term psychological damage wrought on undocumented, primarily Mexican people living in America, where whiteness is vaulted above them in every way. A slyly pivotal monologue sees a Mexican kitchen worker explaining why white women are ‘closer to what God intended’, a form of self-flagellation that, we come to realise, is the product of a life of cultural degradation, shame and secrecy that is part and parcel with the undocumented immigrant experience. Later, Pedro attempts to explain to Julia the ongoing burden of having to live in a place that doesn’t accept his language, and to try and prove any part of himself as worthy to someone (particularly a white someone) bearing his child.
The kind of ambition, scale and cinematic energy we see in La Cocina is rarely reserved in the modern screen sphere for everyday working people. Cúaron has done it, to his credit. Sean Baker is perhaps another. But we don’t have many of the likes of Mikhail Kalatazov or Ford or Chaplin or Visconti anymore, filmmakers who reserved the bigness of cinematic storytelling for the interior lives of people the system tries desperately to make feel small, insignificant. If Nolan or Villeneuve or Gerwig turned their attentions to such stories, would people show up to watch? Doubtful. Perhaps that’s what feels slightly rankling about the film — much as the non-white characters in La Cocina devalue themselves constantly, there’s a general sense that the lives of working class people shouldn’t be depicted with such verve. That’s why I can’t dismiss the feelings of discomfort with Ruizpalacios’ auteurial trickery I had in watching La Cocina as negatively impacting the film. These lives are just as, hell, more deserving of such treatment than those you may see in, say, Saltburn. In art as in life, are not all people owed the chance to be king for a day?
La Cocina premieres on July 26 at 8:30 PM on Rialto Channel (Sky, Channel 39)